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aileen imperatrice self portraits
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36” x 48” This painting relates directly to the emotional ordeal I experienced with my husband in the hospital in September 2002. He was diagnosed in January of 2002 with polycystic kidney disease which has given him cysts both internally and externally of both of his kidneys. At the end of August 2002, one of the external cysts on one of the kidneys had ruptured and he was bleeding internally throughout his entire body for about four days before we realized something was going on. We rushed to the hospital as his body was starting to shut down. At that point there was nothing they could really do because the blood had gone through so much of his body that if they tried to send blood clotting medicine in, it would stop the vital blood flow to his organs, which would kill him. And he had already suffered so much blood loss that he was failing. They told me that he might have a 50% chance at living. So here I was sitting by his bedside thinking very realistically that I could be a widow in a matter of hours. Not knowing if he was going to recover made a lasting psychological impression on me. The bed represents both the hospital bed and the state he was in, very cold, very grey and floating in the midst of the blurry green. There’s blood on the legs of the bed, on the chair and the boxes. The chair doesn’t have a seat or a back, just the outline frame with separated feet on the floor, representing that I was in both places at once, in reality and floating above with him. I wasn’t prepared to deal with this, I don’t think anyone is ever prepared to deal with the loss of a loved one and I was facing that reality. There were so many doctors and nurses coming in and out doing all these tests and so many last minute decisions that had to be made in the middle of the night to try to save him, it was just a mess of medical things that needed to be done but were so overwhelming for me to deal with. I had some great advice from a friend of mine who came in a couple of days into this. She told me to start writing down what the doctors and nurses say, write down what I see happening and then even though I’m not controlling those things, it helped me face the reality of what was going on and helped me to be a part of his healing process. It meant a great deal towards my sanity. The separated feet beneath the chair legs are representing that I had to feel some sense of grounding in reality, but the chair – myself, is still hovering I wasn’t really fully comprehending what we were going through. I did not sleep for ten days; the whole time he was there I was by his side. Those little feet underneath the chair was that little bit of my self still working in reality, trying to deal with the situation while the rest of me was somewhere above. There are five individual boxes, three tied together on the left upper corner and two tied together in the lower right hand corner with images of different vital organs most affected by this episode. The kidney is the top left corner box, beneath is the liver, then the heart, on the lower right is the stomach and then the lungs. We all were hoping for a miracle that his body would recover and thankfully it did. This painting is a very emotional one for me because it is the first one I’ve done representing that whole horrible situation. The title “Visiting Hours Do Not Apply” has special meaning because I was not going to leave his side, and for the most part, the doctors and nurses were understanding and accommodating because they knew I wasn’t going to leave his side. There were a couple of nurses that did give me some trouble, and I basically just looked them straight in the eye and said I’m not going anywhere, I would sit there, not leave and they realized I wasn’t going to leave.
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© 2006 Aileen Imperatrice |
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